The original PickyWops kitchen takeover opening party happened in London during the period when the pizzeria was best known for a single trick. Their vegan pinsa was the same recipe as their regular pinsa, made by chefs who had moved to London from Italy and refused to treat plant-based pizza as a compromise. The opening party for the kitchen takeover was the moment a small Fulham operation announced it was going to try something larger.
This page is the lasting record of that period of the domain. The original blog post that introduced the kitchen takeover opening party is preserved here in spirit, with editorial framing that places it inside the broader story of what PickyWops was trying to do in London restaurants between roughly 2016 and 2022.
What the kitchen takeover actually was
For readers who came across this page through a link in someone else’s piece and now want to know what they are reading about, the short version: PickyWops ran a series of pop-up and guest-chef events in London during the run-up to its expansion. The opening party for the takeover was a public event where the chefs invited press, friends of the project, and customers from the original Fulham location to come and try the menu that the kitchen had been working on. It was the kind of small London restaurant event that gets covered in the trade press and the local food blogs, and the kind of event that, in retrospect, signals a young food business at its most ambitious.
The pizza was pinsa, which is the lighter, longer-fermented Roman style that uses a blend of wheat, rice, and soy flour and ends up with a base that holds up against heavier toppings without going soggy. The chefs were Italian. The plant-based version was not a concession.
What happened after
PickyWops opened more locations across London, including Brick Lane and Notting Hill. They ran the gauntlet that every small London restaurant ran during the period that followed: rising rents, a pandemic, the long slow squeeze on independent operators. The brand closed. The founders moved on. The Instagram account, last we checked, is still used by Cristiano Vitelli for personal posts.
This is a familiar arc in London food. Most of the restaurants that mattered in the 2010s are not the ones that made it through to the other side. Coverage of the period exists in scattered links across the British food press, and pages like this one preserve a little of that record.
Why this page is still here
The pickywops.com domain is now home to Picky Eats, a food editorial site that covers restaurants, kitchen gear, ingredients, and the food worth seeking out. We took the domain over after it became available, and kept the URL of this page so that older inbound links from the restaurant era do not break. Readers who arrive here through one of those old links are welcome to stay. The rest of the site is on the home page.
If you wrote one of the original pieces about the PickyWops opening party and would like a courtesy mention or a corrected link, the address is editor@pickywops.com.